Access to financial resources is an integral aspect of successfully living in a modern society. However, many people have a minimal amount of expendable cash in their savings accounts, and thus do not have enough cash to cover sudden, costly emergencies such as car repairs or an unexpected hospital visit. In such circumstances, individual loans are often preferred over bank loans as they tend to be more practical, flexible, faster, and more easily attainable. However, one critical issue with social lending or individual (i.e., peer-to-peer) loans is establishing a borrower's trust and/or creditworthiness. The larger the loan, the higher the burden or potential awkwardness in obtaining the funds from friends, family, and/or conventional financial institutions. Similarly, the higher the value of the loaned goods or the more expensive the service, the higher the threshold for establishing or verifying a lender's or borrower's trustworthiness as authentic and reliable.
It may be difficult for people who have a positive history of borrowing, lending, servicing, returning, and/or repaying loans from friends or acquaintances to prove their trustworthiness to a stranger or on-line contact because there may not be any records and/or means for verifying prior and/or current transaction activities. Additionally, a potential borrower who has established a reliable cash flow through lending out various assets, spaces, etc., but has done so on his/her own without the help of financial institutions, may have a difficult time proving this to a potential lender who does not know the potential borrower. This is because on-line financial lending platforms use similar means of verifying lenders and borrowers as traditional lending institutions such as banks, and thus often have the same requirements, including credit history, background checks, etc.
The sharing economy (also referred to as collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, peer economy, etc.), broadly speaking, refers to economic activity involving on-line transactions, including peer-to-peer based sharing of access to money, goods and/or services. The sharing economy may take a variety of forms, including using information technology to provide individuals with information that enables the optimization of resources through the mutualization of excess capacity in money, goods and services. Examples of the sharing economy include peer-to-peer lending or sharing, crowdfunding, apartment/house renting or couch-surfing, office sharing, ridesharing and carsharing, co-working, reselling and trading, knowledge and talent-sharing, niche services (e.g., bike renting, pet boarding, etc.), etc. In particular, for example, peer-to-peer lending platforms (e.g., Lending Club, Prosper, etc.) allow individuals to lend and borrow money without going through a traditional bank. However, such platforms typically still use the borrower's credit history to establish and set interest rates, but the individual lender of the money or good bears the risk (i.e., an unsecured personal loan, etc.). Because traditional institution-to-individual lending is not an option for many would-be borrowers, peer-to-peer lending offers opportunities for a wider range of borrowers. Though peer-to-peer lending creates risks for individual lenders, it also allows them to put some of their capital to use (e.g., without researching stocks and funds or settling for meager interest payments from a savings account). Some advantages of the sharing economy include cheaper goods and services, extra income for providers, new and better opportunities, stronger communities, more flexibility in work and life, more ways to earn and save money, less worry about valuable possessions and obligations, more adaptable businesses, etc. Of course, there are also certain disadvantages of the sharing economy, including privacy/safety/trust concerns, no or few guarantees, cooperation with others, market distortions, etc.
Another common issue arising with on-line financial and sharing transactions is identity verification for lenders and borrowers who wish to engage in transactions through the internet. Identity verification can be difficult because some internet users create false identities, commit identity fraud, and/or collude with one another to create the appearance of legitimacy to induce unsuspecting customers (i) to lend financial or other subjects of value which are never repaid or returned, (ii) to pay for services which are never performed, and/or (iii) to borrow/purchase goods which never arrive. Such dishonest individuals may use publicly available information about other people, including name, date of birth, marital status, etc., as well as pictures of such people, in their accounts to support the deceptions. These individuals may also create fake identities with false names, date of birth, address, etc., and create multiple on-line accounts using the false identities. Such accounts may include blog accounts, email addresses, social networking system accounts, etc. These accounts allow dishonest users to fraudulently open additional fake accounts with other websites and businesses, and scam people out of their money and/or possessions. Additionally, such dishonest users may be criminals who rob or harm potential borrowers in person. For example, dishonest users of certain websites have posted ads in order to lure victims to a location where they are robbed or harmed. Thus, the prior art has a technological problem with online security for business sharing transactions, particularly with respect to transactions which start online but then involve offline activity such as travel and a meetup between a lender and a borrower. Current technology cannot properly predict user trustworthiness in a manner which fosters trust between users because it is unable to sufficiently identify and preclude on-line fraudulent activity. Lenders and borrowers who do not know one another do not have an easy means of ascertaining the financial trustworthiness or even the general safety of a contemplated transaction which involves an in-person meeting (e.g., borrowing goods, providing services or skills, renting a space, etc).
The ability to quickly verify the trustworthiness and legitimacy of a potential lender or borrower, or sharer/sheree in a sharing economy, as well as the safety of a contemplated transaction, would therefore encourage selling or sharing monetary or non-monetary subjects of value between potential participants. It will therefore be appreciated that improved systems and methods are needed in the art to address these issues, and to utilize technological improvements for determining and verifying an individual's trustworthiness in sharing, lending, borrowing, purchasing, or other transactions.